APA marked the one-year anniversary of the Boko Haram abductions of over 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria by calling on Congress to take action to ensure the basic rights of women and girls worldwide to live a life free of persecution and violence.
"We must work to end the abhorrent prevalence of gender-based violence around the world, and to have systems in place to provide girls with safe access to educational and other opportunities for healthy development," says Gwendolyn P. Keita, PhD, executive director of APA's Public Interest Directorate.
APA has urged psychologists to contact their members of Congress to encourage them to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, a United Nations convention adopted in 1979 that defines what constitutes discrimination against women and sets forth an agenda for national action to end such discrimination. Despite the great number of signatories among world nations, the United States has not ratified the convention.
APA is also urging its members to push for passage of the International Violence Against Women Act. This legislation would integrate gender-based violence prevention and response efforts into all U.S. government programming overseas and make ending violence against women and girls a diplomatic and foreign assistance priority for the United States.
One year ago, Boko Haram, a group of militant Islamist extremists, abducted 276 girls from their school in Chibok, Nigeria. To date, the whereabouts of many of these girls remain unknown. This tragedy highlights the ongoing global challenges that many children face — a lack of security, freedom, rights and control over their own bodies and fate.
To mark the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of the Nigerian schoolgirls, a group of psychologists crafted a call to actionopens in new window to the international community stated as concrete recommendations, grounded in international human rights standards and psychological science, to prevent, reduce and eliminate trafficking and other forms of violence against women and girls. Numerous APA divisions and the National Council of Schools and Programs of Professional Psychology have endorsed the call to action, which appears at The Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violenceopens in new window.
This effort draws upon APA's policies dating to 1988 related to ending human trafficking and violence against children by governments, and supporting the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child and human rights more broadly.
— Jim Sliwa
